The nature of active sites for carbon dioxide electroreduction over oxide-derived copper catalysts

The active sites for CO2 electroreduction (CO2R) to multi-carbon (C2+) products over oxide-derived copper (OD-Cu) catalysts are under long-term intense debate. This paper describes the atomic structure motifs for product-specific active sites on OD-Cu catalysts in CO2R. Herein, we describe realistic OD-Cu surface models by simulating the oxide-derived process via the molecular dynamic simulation with neural network (NN) potential. After the analysis of over 150 surface sites through NN potential based high-throughput testing, coupled with density functional theory calculations, three square-like sites for C–C coupling are identified. Among them, Σ3 grain boundary like planar-square sites and convex-square sites are responsible for ethylene production while step-square sites, i.e. n(111) × (100), favor alcohols generation, due to the geometric effect for stabilizing acetaldehyde intermediates and destabilizing Cu–O interactions, which are quantitatively demonstrated by combined theoretical and experimental results. This finding provides fundamental insights into the origin of activity and selectivity over Cu-based catalysts and illustrates the value of our research framework in identifying active sites for complex heterogeneous catalysts.